Preface: Collective Impact calls for transformational practice among our organizations. Models and theories and innovative ideas are critical to the work, but we also need to change how we operate and find ways to maximize our collective capacity to work better, smarter, and with a sense of urgency. This is one attempt to talk about that.
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Recently I joined in the Collective Impact Summit hosted in Toronto by Tamarack. Collective impact is all about different types of groups working together to advance a common goal, and while the practice is really nothing new, the work of Tamarack acknowledges that this type of work is:
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Tamarack just finished hosting the first ever Collective Impact Summit (CIS) in Toronto, Ontario in October 2014. It was an amazing gathering of 300 folks working to advance community change and impact in Canada, the US, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Israel, and Nigeria. The energy in the room was palpable as leaders from across a variety of spectrums shared their questions, struggles, and lessons learned in implementing Collective Impact.
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My mother was a professor so you’d think her unequivocal advice would have been to go to university after high school, but instead she directed me toward Canada World Youth, a federally funded international exchange program designed to get young Canadians thinking about cross-cultural learning, community service, and issues of local and global concern. This was long before gap years became popular and I was the only one from my graduating class doing such a thing.
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In the 1990s I was terribly ideological and saw the world in containers of political, economic, and social good and bad and fought to eradicate the bad and establish the good. I had three young children at the time and now like to console myself about that period by thinking I was sleep-deprived. Or maybe I was just oxygen-deprived.
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Community Animator's Note: This blog was originally published on FSG's Strategic Evaluation Blog by Katelyn Mack on October 15, 2014. It has been re-posted with permission.
Have you ever been called an expert? If you are reading this post, chances are you have. It may have been by a colleague, a boss, a client, a professor…or maybe, by a parent. I’m not sure about you, but I sometimes get an uneasy feeling when I am referred to as an “expert.” People usually mean it as a compliment. In essence, there is some innate knowledge I have from my training or experience that they don’t have.
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